LeseLust & LeseLiebe

Happy Holidays, Hungry Readers! Instead of giving you the same-old best-seller list of gift suggestions, I thought I'd make this year's post a little more personal and share which books my family will be giving/receiving. Maybe you'll find one of them to be a good gift for someone you know as well. :) The Guinness World Records 2017 edition is for the boy child, but it always turns into a full-family gift as he reads aloud every. single. record. Mostly interesting for all, but beware this is not for the faint of heart; many of the bug and FOOD records can be quite disgusting! The American Girl Guide is for the girl child because, like any fictional character, even the dolls have extensive back-stories. More history = deeper understanding = more imaginative and intelligent play! Harry Potter #4 is for my husband, the most-behindest reader of all time. ;) We have a family rule that we can't watch a film until we've read the book and he REALLY wants to catch up to t...

I’m a total food junkie, or foodie, so there is always food in my books. We use food as a culture in so many ways, so it’s only natural to draw that into stories. I’ll be honest - it’s been a few years since I wrote the first Tansy - so I was struggling to remember all of the foodie bits in the book. So what does one do when they can’t remember? They open their Kindle Cloud Reader and use the trusty Cntrl+F to find the food! Wow, was there a lot of food! First, a little insight into Tansy’s story. She’s a twenty-something soul who is sort of lost, wandering from bad love interest to bad love interest and working at a psychic hotline call center. She really has an ethical problem with her job and the way she is expected to lead customers on, so when she gets fired for being too helpful to a caller, she isn’t surprised. She ends up meeting the caller, Callie, and begins the quest to help figure out what has happened to Callie’s missing boyfriend Buster, a shady car dealer’s wash bay guy....

In my memoir All Growed Up , it’s 1982 and I leave my hometown of Belfast, Northern Ireland for the first time in my life to begin a ‘coming of age’ adventure of learning as an eighteen year old student at university. One particular chapter of the book serves up the flavours of traditional Irish food. In Go Wild in the Country I tell the story of my first visit to my new girlfriend’s house in a small rural village in the middle of Northern Ireland. I meet the lovely Lesley’s mother who is very warm, friendly and hospitable and more importantly, a legend in her own kitchen. However, like every good Irish Mammy when it comes to offering the best of food to a guest, she cannot take no for an answer. The repercussions are most embarrassing! There are two main Irish foodstuffs involved in this unfortunate incident, one sweet and one savoury. The sweets are the typical fare baked in every self-respecting kitchen in Northern Ireland and produced alongside a nice cup of tea on all occasions. ...

When the EOTWAWKI (end of the world as we know it) arrives, everything will change. The Darkness , as I like to call it, will envelop all. And I mean every last bit of our lives. Gone will be our electricity, our phones, our cars…our current way of life. Food will disappear from store shelves and your own pantry so fast that we won’t have time to think or react. Fresh water will become our daily quest. And still, we’ll have to find something to eat. So, my friends, what are we going to do for food? Want some help with that one? Here’s my top three finds for you: 1. Venison – If you eat meat, eventually all most choices are going to fade away. The good news is that deer are plentiful in almost area in the United States. Just this morning my wife almost ran into a deer while only a block from our home. And we live in a very urban area. City deer are easy to take. They don’t have the built in fear that their country cousins possess. With a small handgun or any bow, you’ll be able to tak...

Thanks for inviting me to share some of my culinary insights from research on my Free Men and Dreamers books. I popped into a gift shop in Williamsburg, Virginia in the early days of work on book one, Dark Sky at Dawn , and picked up a copy of a small, but priceless cookbook titled simply, The Williamsburg Cookbook. It was filled with primarily British recipes, most of which involved the ingredients of their day—cream, butter, meat and potatoes. Journal entries from actual colonial and pre-Civil War women helped me carve out the menus and beverages in DSAD and the other books in the series. These journals made it apparent that the planning, growing, harvesting, and preparing of food was a grueling, never-ending labor. I had a scene where the characters prepared chickens for cooking. Imagine chasing, catching, killing, draining, gutting, plucking, and burning off the pin-feathers of a bird, before you can even begin your recipe. Perfectly seasoned fried chicken is my weakness, and I’ll...

When you’re confronted with the Apocalypse, food is a primary concern for the survivors. In the case of the Daimones Trilogy things are simpler and more complex at the same time. The world changes abruptly for Dan Amenta and his family of wife Mary and daughter Annah. One day, they discover everything they gave for granted is no more. Not a nuclear catastrophe, something unimaginable has happened, and something nothing could have ever prepared them to deal with. When the world starts to degrade, ancient skills have to be re-learned, new habits need to become routines, and food… after a while, food needs to be grown and they need to discover how to manage nature in a sustainable way. For Dan and family, food diet becomes what our ancestors had access to: wild berries and game, farm animals, and old family recipes. In a world where perishable food has… perished, drinks of any kind are aplenty, and the family only has to pick what they need. Dan is fond of cigars and whiskey, single malt...

Famine and Feast My characters in The Persistence of Memory and Other Plays  are gluttons for hypocrisy, arrogance, self-righteousness, and moral indignation; the last being “jealousy with a halo” according to H.G. Wells. Most everywhere, this nutrition is typical fare for youth. Most of these characters are young and live in a world of stark contrasts. They only see extremes: love/hate, want/need, poor/rich, self/other, insider/outsider, and so on. My characters suffer from an abundance of self-awareness about how alone they are in the world. They are indignant about this loneliness. Of course, wisdom comes with age. The stark black and white views of youth evolve into the vivid colors of age and experience, if we are fortunate enough to survive the preliminaries. Better sustenance would benefit my characters. Living is a feast of humility. It nurtures honesty, integrity, and wisdom in the best of us. The worst of us fail to learn, trapped in a vicious cycle to ‘rise and repeat’ u...